To call Brian Goeltzenleuchter a conceptual artist would be to damn him with the faintest of praise. Brian's Contraposto is a project that explores the context of fine art within the commerce of art itself (or perhaps the commerce of art within the context of fine art, itself). He pits the wry against the profound, fashion against substance, the ethereal against the enduring. A lot of people don't get it, and that is fine with Brian, because much of what he creates stands very well alone.

La Jolla first encountered Brian's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego last year, where he had set up a Contraposto "shop" selling Rodin's Kiss and Benin Bronze sculpture cast into gilded self-destructing wax candles, enduring videos of transitional subjects, sonic impact audio disks --and Institutional Wellbeing -- commissioned olfactory portraits of institutions as diverse as a hospital and a school. (He is now working with the museum to create its olfactory portrait.)

AvantNez is a project within a project, one dedicated to the art of the individual olfactory portrait. AvantNez stands independent as progenitor of a compelling, though nascent, sensory expression. AvantNez anchors the "profound" within the artist's conceptual, and frequently otherwise tongue-in-cheek, vision. The genius of Contraposto's exploration of the consumption of such modern cultural icons as museums by the voracious appetite and insatiabillity of commerce is dependent upon the absolute integrity of its foundation. That foundation is AvantNez and its elevation of the olfactory to fine art. Just as history inevitably will judge, rejudge, and ultimately reject some that is brought within their walls by custodians of today's museums, much shall inevitably endure. So will it likely be for AvantNez, the leg on which Brian's Goeltzenleuchter's Contraposto is balanced.